Moral Credibility

Shorter Joey Ratz: It's not a crime if the pope does it.

On Saturday, the Vatican’s chief spokesman acknowledged that the Church’s response to cases of sexual abuse by priests was crucial to its credibility and it must “acknowledge and make amends for” even decades-old cases.

“The nature of this issue is bound to attract media attention and the way the Church responds is crucial for its moral credibility,” the Vatican’s chief spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, said on Vatican Radio.

Listen up, you withered eunuch bastard -- there is no debate outside your church as to what should be done. The only appropriate response when you find out one of your priests is raping children is to -- get this -- inform the law. Quietly shuttling the rapist to another diocese where he can rape more children would not even occur to a morally responsible or credible human being.

What the fuck is wrong with these people? When the priest-rape scandals in America were happening a few years back, Ratzinger's response was that it was an American thing, that our sexually permissive culture roped these men of god into vile acts. He said this, mind you, having personally transferred child-rapey priest Peter Hullermann (and yes, I'll go out on a limb and stipulate that Hullermann's acts of taking an 11-year-old kid up to the mountains, getting him drunk, locking him in a room, and forcing him to suck Hullermann's cock constitutes rape, pure and simple) around Europe. So he's a liar as well as an abetter of child molesters.

You know, believe it or not, this is not an indictment of individual Catholics, who are finding some measure of grace somewhere in the tradition of faith, and that's fine. But look, folks -- if you're giving money to these people, then you're also giving money to these people. Anyone can argue like a Jesuit about degrees of moral complicity, but at the very least, I'd feel like a straight-up sucka. Maybe consider giving that tithe money to something with a bit lower (moral and financial) overhead. The problem is not that they have rapists in their midst, it's that they think they're above basic accountability for it.